ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at Prague SR political activities in the 1930s and covers briefly their fates during the Second World War. As noted, the previous level of party political activity came to an end at the beginning of the 1930s. This was for a number of reasons including the various splits within the Prague SRs, the withdrawal of funding by the Czechoslovak government and the momentous changes in the Soviet Union that accompanied industrialisation and collectivisation. The growth of fascism in Europe, the heightened international tensions and the general disillusionment with democracy had the most significant impact on the lives and thoughts of the SRs. A study of the Russian émigrés’ full involvement in European political life enriches our understanding of general European, as well as Russian, experiences in this period. The SRs shared the fates of many of their European contemporaries. Collectivisation and industrialisation wrought such changes in Soviet society to
which SR activity abroad could not adjust. A completely new society and new socioeconomic system-Stalinism-had come into being in the Soviet Union. Many SRs felt they could oppose Stalinism from a position of democratic socialism, but that the old SR Party programme offered no specific guide to how to deal with this phenomenon. In conditions of emigration, with only slender contact with Russia, it proved impossible to revise the programme. Gurevich wrote to Chernov in 1936 that he felt he no longer belonged to any political party and that:
Speaking honestly, I do not believe in the resurrection of the SR party. It seems to me that it already belongs in its entirety to history, since even the specific elements of its programme have become almost without object (nepredmetnoi) In Russia itself such new conditions have been created that even if the regime were to democratise there would be no place for the old parties.1
